‘Replaceability’ isn't as important as you might think (or we've suggested)

Abstract

Often if you turn down a skilled job, the role simply won’t be filled at all because there’s no suitable substitute available. For this and other reasons we don’t place as much weight as we used to on the idea of ‘replaceability’. When we started 80,000 Hours, one of the key ideas we presented was the replaceability argument: Suppose you become a surgeon and perform 100 life saving operations. Naively it seems like your impact is to save 100 people’s lives.